Named a Best Book of the Year by "Vogue," "Los Angeles Times," and "The New Republic""New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice

A FRANK, INTELLIGENT, AND DEEPLY MOVING DEBUT MEMOIR

The precocious only child of a doctor and a classical musician, Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York. Theirs was a world that revolved around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and discussions of the latest advances in medicine--and one that ended when Marco's father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, with surprising and often devastating effects. Written in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley, "The Scientists" is a book that grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance--the ways in which we learn from our parents, and then learn to see them separately from ourselves.

About the Author

Marco Roth was raised amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side. After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazine "n+1", in 2004. Recipient of the 2011 Shattuck prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia. "The Scientists" is his first book.

Praise For The Scientists…

Praise for The Scientists:

“Riveting...Part mystery, part tragedy, part spiritual and intellectual biography. It’s beautifully written and as honest as a book can be.”—Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

“A gorgeous memoir no one will be able to put down.”—Mary Karr, author of Lit

“The Scientists is an act of love—a circumspect, often bitter, always studious love.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Circuitous, elegant, and fiercely intelligent...With the wisdom of a good reader and the humility of a lost soul, Mr. Roth sorts through the mess of his past—in order to plot his escape from it.”—The Economist

“Beautifully intelligent and moving...A literary detective story and also an object lesson in the way the self can be constituted by literature.”—Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“An exquisitely written and intensely interior book, one that eschews the contemporary memoir’s penchant for epiphanies, redemption, and tidy resolutions...Extraordinary.”—Laura Miller, Salon

“This is the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional—an education for our times.”—Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review

“Marco Roth’s memoir is a farewell to a bygone Jewish American culture—polyglot, intellectual, Europhile, psychoanalytic—and simultaneously a renewal of that culture. It’s both moving and tough-minded, a book of high intellect and deep feeling the like of which nobody else could write.” —Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision

“The Scientists manages to recuperate for our time a certain kind of personal, idiosyncratic, private writing that moves at the speed of an actual very high intelligence. No one in our generation has written anything like this.”—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

“The Scientists is...not simply a perceptive and highly literary memoir but a book about attempting to uncover the mystery of a father’s life after his death, and the posthumous intimacy that forms.”—Alexander Aciman, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] beautifully sharp memoir...Marco Roth turns his analytical eye on the culturally rich milieu of his upbringing and the mode of education he received within the walls of his home...The Scientists is composed with the same analytical eye for influence that the critic has brought to the table as an editor and writer for n+1. A less diligent memoirist might have easily restricted this meditation on retrospective reading to more defensive, sentimental territory, and Roth’s acknowledgment of the uncertainty of his purpose is commendable both for its bravery and its awareness...The Scientists is still, at its most fundamental, a family romance: elegiac, rife with frustrations of desire and secrecy...Roth’s prose, which has been well tuned by years of academic writing and meticulous study of literary classics, is luminous and graceful. His gift for building plot from domestic drama is similarly patent; his story is gripping, and The Scientists: A Family Romance is a burning work, alive with all the romantic potentials one would expect of a canonical classic—or, better yet, of a family life lived deeply, richly, and painfully.”—Ryan Sheldon, Blomblog

“This book is suffused with real pain...The best things in The Scientists are Mr. Roth’s spiny meditations on sex and ambition and family and love and death. The sound this book makes is the sound of a keen mind on shuffle. He strongly evokes a generational sense of malaise...[The Scientists] lingers in the cranium.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Roth’s prose evokes a calm, contemplative feel, with occasional flights of poetic fancy...The Scientists is at its strongest as Roth tries to unravel the mystery of his father. That relationship, fraught as it is, brings forth Roth’s humanist side, as he tries not only to understand his father, but also to redeem him...The Scientists evinces a compelling portrait of the intellectual as a young man.”—Viet Dinh, Lambda Literary

“Marco Roth’s affecting memoir The Scientists...evokes that world of intellectuals, Oriental rugs and a postwar highbrow aesthetic of Schubert, Turgenev and Mann. This is less of a confessional memoir than a fiercely intellectual one, but that’s not to say it’s not emotionally powerful...This unsentimental memoir is a cautionary tale about hyper-intellectualism in which emotional life is at the back of the bus.” —Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune (Editor’s Choice)

“Roth brings a wistful dryness to his work; he is relaxed in the peculiar details of a story that limns much of what is universal between fathers and sons...Here a strange, perfectionist family becomes worth pondering. The Scientists produced a son worth knowing.”—Karen R. Long, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“To the extent that lucid, self-lacerating prose can break a cycle of frustrations, The Scientists is a literary triumph.”—Steven G. Kellman, Forward

“Profound, intricate, literary, a little gossipy and more than a little heartbreaking—such is Marco Roth’s echt New York memoir, The Scientists . . . Far from confessional, Roth’s exploration is tough-minded, beautifully written, sometimes wry and self-mocking and always faithful to the complexities of his own feeling an thinking, his own failures and frailties.” —Elizabeth Benedict, Huffington Post

“What makes The Scientists singularly brave is not the nature of its disclosures but the fact that Roth, a great writer, risked appearing mercenary or opportunistic in order to write it. He staked his relatively young reputation on the belief that he could convey absolute honesty and resist the impulse to curry sympathy or self-mythologize. At times Roth comes off poorly—overly sensitive, or too eager to think where he might feel—but it is a measure of his honesty that he never seems oblivious to his faults. In revisiting experiences more painful than many of his readers will ever have to endure, he is incapable of weakness or insincerity...One marvels at Roth’s inner life, which he has rendered so richly. If one begins this book asking, ‘Just who does he think he is?’ that reader will certainly finish it thinking, ‘Glad I asked.’”—Stefan Beck, Barnes and Noble Review

“The Scientists is...a book worth reading...The memoir is at once about the process of maturation, and an example of how to write...intelligent and emotionally moving. More importantly, The Scientists is a brave and honest examination of shifting cultural values, liberal hypocrisy, and privileged guilt. Above all else, it is an exploration of the best way to live one’s life—which is, after all, the very point of literature.”—The Coffin Factory

“A lyrical depiction of education, family relationships, self-knowledge, and ‘a culture that believes no one should suffer, least of all in public.’”—The New Yorker

“[The Scientists] is a moving exercise in literary detective work.”—Aaron Hicklin, Out Magazine

“Nothing seems embellished in The Scientists. Roth wasn’t looking to tell a coming-of-age story or write a book that feeds into his idea that the modern reader views literature as ‘spectacle’—as he wrote in a 2006 issue of n+1. Roth’s concern with The Scientists is to tell his story, the story of a dark period in his life and the way he coped with it. He isn’t trying to feed juicy pieces of gossip to sell the book, rather he takes the brave step of telling his story the only way he seems able to, and it has paid off in dividends by the time you finally close it.”—Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“The Scientists: A Family Romance is a profound memoir.”—Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch

“[Roth is] self-aware, perceptive and soulful...[The Scientists] feels wisely grounded. It's an elegy not just for a lost parent but for what Roth’s bio calls ‘the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.’”—Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune